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Doomsday Clock To Advance
Dik Zak writes "Many news sites are reporting that the magazine Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists intends to move the hands of the Doomsday Clock on Wednesday 17 January. The clock was started at seven minutes to midnight during the Cold War and has been moved forward or back at intervals, depending on the state of the world and the prospects for nuclear war. Midnight represents destruction by nuclear war. It is not revealed in which direction the hands of the clock will be moved, but it should be safe to assume that they will move closer to midnight: the magazine cites 'worsening nuclear [and] climate threats.' The clock stood at two minutes to midnight when both the United States and the Soviet Union tested nuclear weapons in 1953. The farthest away from midnight it ever got was 17 minutes, in 1991 when both superpowers signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. It currently stands at seven minutes to midnight."
So, is that Eastern Standard Time?
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Is there some equation by which this is determined or is this another abstact measure of FUD that we could just as easily set to "Red" as 7 till midnight?
You need more psychedelic art in your life. rhesusmonkey.deviantart.com
So you have 12 hours to work with, and you start off at 17 minutes to midnight? Seems like a case of hyperbole to me - in that scale, the world is ALWAYS about to blow up in a nuclear war, so it quickly loses its impact.
It's like holding the stupid "threat level" at yellow or orange for a long amount of time, eventually people accept it and begin to ignore it.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Jack Bauer will disarm the russian ICBM 10^-23 second before it detonates, so we haven't got anything to worry about!
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I'm sick of waiting for the return of my deity.
1 voice in a sea of voices
Some superpower or another needs to preemptively attack and destroy this doomsday clock before it hurts someone.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Suddenly I realize where the song title comes from.
Wouldn't this be a good reason to get rid of daylight savings time?
Sig cannot be found.
new pressure from climate change for expanded civilian nuclear power that could increase proliferation risks.
These guys are not claiming doomsday from climate change.
And despite the increase of proliferation and individual threats, the global doomsday we legitimately feared in the 80's is long gone.
I think proliferation in the Middle East will bring some long needed maturity to those ridiculous tribal governments or be self-limiting. Bad for some cities, but not global conflict. India-Pakistan nukes may have even calmed that situation. Mutual destruction pacts might actually work.
That means those of us on Eastern Standard Time have already experienced Doomsday. (Psst, Central folk, his name is..., nah, let them experience it, too.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I was listening to an interesting radio show out here in San Diego yesterday (The Dangerous Dick and Scibba show) and they were talking about the 20K troop increase as a way to get ready to go into Iran (a nuclear power). People were guessing that Bush/Cheney/and company want to try and neutralize the Iranian threat before leaving office. Me thinks this might be related...
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -Confucius
Now is a good time to read and print...
6 48
The good news about nuclear destruction
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=51
What to do if a nuclear disaster is imminent!
http://www.ki4u.com/guide.htm
A nuke or two going off in the US would be terrible. But let's be glad we don't face annihilation today like we did during the cold war. Think about it, at the time there was a real risk of humanity being set back a thousand years, or according to some theories even disappearing. Terrorism is nothing next to that. They have nothing like the numbers of weapons or delivery systems to do what we or the Russians could do. India and Pakistan doesn't have them, and N. Korea doesn't have them. People just aren't comfortable without a certain amount of upset, and they enlarge or shrink whatever troubles they face to fill that void.
From the summary...
It is not revealed in which direction the hands of the clock will be moved...
From TFA...
The minute hand of the Doomsday Clock will be moved closer to midnight on January 17 (emphasis added).
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
You're forgetting about the people that either: believe their god will save them from destruction; or just plain don't care if they die. Terrorist and insane heads of states (Ahmadinejad?), for example.
"We have exactly as much freedom as we are willing to demand and as we can defend."
It's kind of instructive to think what we would have to do - start with the hard to reach - we need to kill all the life around the "smokers" at the bottom of the ocean, at the same time as carpet bombing the earth with nukes - but you've really got to cook every square mile of the entire planet. That means raising the temperature above boiling point (there's life at temperatures everywhere up to there) for long enough to kill every spore, bacterium. The important thing to bear in mind is that to kill life you have to kill every single bacterium, because one bacterium can mutate. In short it's not going to happen, it's probably technically infeasible, and no one wants to do it (not even George Bush)
I like to think this sums up two things - one the horrible grandiosity of environmental pressure groups - starting with their assumption that humans are powerful enough to do something that is virtually impossible, then assuming that they are more important than the people that can do this, that they are only people who understand the big picture. The other is that they know fuck all about any actual science (i.e. physics, chemistry, microbiology), and they don't seem to care to learn more.
Real climate scientists I salute - they do something virtually impossible. Environmental politicians (for that is what Greenpeace, and this crowd are) are just republicans who found a different issue first. Look at Al Gore - when he's not trying to ban music with obscene lyrics (PMRC) he's saving the environment with glossy hollywood films. Bless.
How to Destroy the Earth
I only remember the 80s.
.. and I'm still young.
.. I don't have words for the stupidity. The world is relatively safe. The major disaster and major fear we have is from islamic terrorists sending a couple of planes into a building or two. A BUILDING OR TWO! THATS IT! Eighteen years ago we were afraid that New York as a whole would be anhilated in a few minutes. ALL of it. Not just a building or two on manhattan.
I remember, vividly, how my parents thought me that it was a cold war between the US and the Soviet Union.
I remember the retorics. I remember the fear. I remember how I was told that we could be destroyed by nuclear weapons.
I remember MAD.
I was born in 1979.
People born just 5 or 6 years later than me - do not remember this. They have never experienced the cold war. They can't remember it. They can't even understand the doomsday clock, the fear, the MAD uncertainty.
I was 10 years old. I helped chop the Berlin wall down. Physically.
People, just 5 years younger than me - don't understand what it was all about. They don't remember.
Now, this article is about the doomsday clock moving forward. From 17 minutes to midnight. Heh
And these guys want to move the hands forward on a clock of global doom. Right.
It was right in the 80s. It's not right anymore. Move it backwards three or four hours, and it might be right. This way - it's just ridiculous.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
Meanwhile, the Who-Still-Gives-A-Flying-Fig-About-The-Doomsday-Cl ock Clock remains stuck on flashing 12:00
Damn, that means Doomsday will be tape-delayed on the west coast.
On that topic, amateur geocide watchers and fans of the International Earth-Destruction Advisory Board will be reassured to learn that unlike the Nuclear Death Clock, the Current Earth-Destruction Status is expected to remain at its current status of "Not Destroyed" for the forseeable future.
qntm.org
Actually we are getting dangerously close to a nuclear war. The US now has TWO Carrier Strike Groups in the Persian Gulf. The Gulf is getting so crowded that a US sub bumped into a Japanese tanker. Ted Koppel on NPR Friday evening said that people in the military have indicated that our assets in the Gulf are not useful for combating the insurgency in Iraq but are well suited for strikes on Iran. Koppel said that senior military personnel have told him that it is likely that the US will be at war with Iran before 2007 is over.y Id=6836561
t ype=topNews&storyID=2007-01-07T185259Z_01_L0675940 5_RTRUKOC_0_UK-IRAN-NUCLEAR-ISRAEL.xml&WTmodLoc=To p%2BNews-C1-Headline-8
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
Israel is drawing up plans for a NUCLEAR strike on Iran's nuclear power program.
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?
In the last several weeks Bush has fired and reassigned several high level military and intelligence people that were in some way in his way to a broader mid-east war. Generals John Abizaid and George Casey who were opposed to an escalation in Iraq and John Negroponte who has recently stated that Iran is 10 years from having the Bomb.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010807R.shtml
I'd say that the doomsday clock is definitely ticking, and we are in for a shit storm in 2007.
-- QED